My friend Odette sent me a picture from her wedding in 2019 – the two of us crammed into a mirror in a hotel bathroom – and said “look how flat my stomach looks in this. I need to buy one of these corset things NOW.” I stared at the photo for a full ten seconds before saying what I really thought, which was: Odette, that is not your stomach being flat. That is you being unable to breathe properly and standing at a 45 degree angle because the boning is cutting into your ribs. She didn’t believe me. Actually didn’t believe me, argued with me for ten whole minutes by the taxis, and I dropped it because it wasn’t worth fighting over on our wedding day.
But it got me thinking – because I’d thought the exact same thing for probably six years up until that point.
I owned three waist trainers at my peak – I went and checked, actually, how many I own sat at my desk right now, and one of them still has the safety tag on. I wore them thinking that something was happening under there. Some gradual moulding, some actual physical difference that would be permanent once I took it off. It never did any of that. Never had.
And I think it’s worth unpicking, properly this time, why so many of us – myself included, for way too long – got this tricked.
What a corset is actually doing to your body when you’re wearing it
Ok so hear me out, because this bit isn’t sexy or marketable like “waist trainer makes your waist smaller” but: a corset flattens your stomach the same way that if you grab your washing trousers at the waist, the bottom flattens out. It squashes you. The tight lacing makes everything all bunched up, pushes all your internal organs up and into your ribs because there is literally nowhere else for them to go. Your stomach, your intestine, your lung diaphragm, it all gets pushed up and shoved around whenever you’re wearing one. When you take the thing off, everything just naturally falls back into where it started – because your body actually wants it to be that way. It’s not wrong. Your body is not incorrect just because a garment changes how it looks temporarily. That’s not how compression works. Has never been.
I tested out this theory – properly. Like, I didn’t get a scientist to do it for me but I did make sure I could trust my results – over about three or four months last year. Every day I’d wear my waist trainer, take measurements of my actual waist first thing in the morning before I put it on, note that down on my phone like honestly fucking OCD. Not once did I see that number decrease by half a centimetre. But what did happen – and I want to be upfront about this because it’s the reason I stopped wearing them altogether – was that by month two or three I started getting this dull pain on one side that my GP eventually told me was due to the compression rig moulded up against my ribs for hours and hours, multiple days in a row. She wasn’t overconflict with me about it, wasn’t like “you’re doing yourself permanent damage,” but she did tut at me when I told her how often I wore it. That tut has haunted me longer than any dream of a “flat stomach” ever did.
The worst part about all of it is the marketing round these faux-pas Flat Tums cash-ins leans incredibly heavily on the second you take it off. There’s always photos, always a whole Instagram “reveal” process and minute of astounded admiration for your stomach looking “smaller.” Trust me, I’ve bought into that bullshit too. But it does temporarily, yeah, that bit’s true. Your entire torso has been smooshed into an unnatural position for hours on end and the tissue just needs time to bounce back. Give it half an hour, your body’s going to look exactly how it did the day you bought that stupid thing. Documented that immediate minute and suddenly your waist is magically smaller? Sure. Wait an hour, then try snapping another pic. You’ll see what I mean. A mate of mine had my mum try one on once, took it off her gently as she was protesting how comfortable it was and then just looked at her and said “you’ve gone a weird shape.” Best – and most accurate – review of a waist trainer I think anyone’s ever given.
The part where I have to admit that I loved how my clothes looked in them
Because I don’t want this piece to read as if I hate waist trainers and think nobody should ever wear them – because I do not think that, and would be lying if I said I did. They do serve a purpose! A very real, very specific purpose. It’s just not what they’re being sold for. If you wear a waist trainer under a fitted dress; for a few hours; at an event where you’ll be standing up, or moving around, not super eat loads; they will, yes, smooth out the line of your body. Really and truly. But it’s just doing what shapewear used to do, plain and simple. There’s no magic to it. And do I love that specific function? HELL YES I DO. But that’s an outfit accessory, not a body accessory. Important distinction; one you can take off at the end of the night and everything returns to normal, and one that’s being marketed – quite deliberately in lots of instances – as something that’ll change your body if you just wear it enough. They’re two different products doing two very different jobs. Calling one by the name of the other doesn’t make either of them true.
That breakdown was so beautifully put by my sister in law Priya actually, when she borrowed mine to wear before a work event and said “oh this is literally just Spanx with tits.” And honestly? Never thought about waist trainers the same since. Smashing your natural body shape into some sort of moulded Elizabethan shape holes just to make a dress look ‘smoother’ on you. It isn’t smoothening your shape, it’s altering it for half a day. And if waist trainer companies were honest about them being for specific dresses rather than specific bodies I honestly still would have three instead of one. Because smoothing down the line of a dress is an absolutely valid thing to want. The “do waist trainers make your waist smaller” question is where they start fucking with you.
How on earth the myth that they’ll “train” your waist over time just won’t die
Look at that word right there. Training. It’s doing a lot of heavy lifting in “waist trainer,” let’s be real. It takes the ethos of working out, ofslow and steady and legitimately changing your body, and attaches it to a keyword-searchable fad that does literally nothing of the sort. To train something is to teach it a new shape, a shape that it’ll hold once you stop teaching it that shape. It promises that just because you’re wearing a garment every day, your body will change as a result of doing so. Training.
That definitely wasn’t what was happening when I wore mine. Compression. That’s what it was. An honest description of what happens whenever you wear a waist trainer.
There was actually a really specific era – I’m going to date-stamp this because generalisations help nobody – between about 2015 and 2017 where you couldn’t scroll Instagram without seeing a celebrity, wearing a waist trainer and some caption about “corset training” and “getting my waist snatched.” It was sold purely as this thing you could wear every day, take one teeny step closer to that flat instagram waist every time you put it on, and six months down the line boom. Perfect as a dinner plate waist. I bought into it. Like, head-numbingly fell for it head over heels believed it. I did the calculations in my head; if I wore mine for eight hours a day, every day, for six months there has to be SOME sort of change. That’s how working out your muscles works. That’s how forming good habits work. That’s literally how everything about your body works except, y’know, your waist size. Your waist is mostly bone structure and leftover fat, and neither of those react to being squashed for eight hours a day like straight up muscle would.
There’s pretty definitive research around waist training, as little as there actually is, and every single study concludes with “no, it doesn’t change your waist size permanently, but it will temporarily” because that’s just not what your body does. Nobody’s getting hurt from waist trainers, and they can’t ‘squeeze you into shape’ like maybe your crazy ex.
What I’d say to Odette now. Three years, many aches and tweets later.
Obviously I sat Odette down a year or so after her wedding and said all of the above. She hadn’t taken mine off at a tempo t shirt in she insisted on wearing it whenever she wore that dress because it always fell nicely, which… is literally what I do with mine now too. What changed was not my drawer full of corsets. It was the expectation I had whenever I went to pull one out.
I stopped waiting for it to alter my body. It’s not gonna. Your body will never look like the faux-Instagram picture of your ribs those sales emails try and convince you it will.
She still has hers, and loves it for the one occasion she intended to buy it for in the first place. Me too. What’s changed is the ego next to it on my dresser. Once I accepted that it wasn’t gonna magically change overnight, I started enjoying wearing them again – because they’re actually quite comfy – for the one thing they’re good at: smoothing out a dress for half a day. No internal organs rearranging required.
